Re: Cocotron used for a real-world app

[Fred Kiefer]

Nicola Pero wrote:

> Anyway, you have good points that cross-compiling from Xcode might be
> appealing to some people. :-)
> 
> It wouldn't be difficult to set up a similar thing for cross-compiling
> from Apple to Windows using GNUstep.
> You need to get a MinGW cross-compilation environment running on your
> Apple, then get the GNUstep
> libraries in it.  Then tell Xcode to use the cross-compilation compiler.
> :-)

I just tried the cross compilation package from Cocotron and it works
rather nicely. They provide a script that downloads gcc and binutils
plus a few libraries, patches them and compiles them for cross
compilation. All that is rather easy on the Mac as you already have a
fully functional Unix environment to start with.
All I had to do is change the version number of the mpf library as the
one they are referencing is no longer available.

It would be worhtwhile for somebody with deeper gcc and binutility
knowledge to take a look at those patches and see what would be suitable
for integration in the standard version.

This framework also installs cross compilation target for Xcode and
there documentation include a description of build settings that need to
be manually adjusted. I failed with that on a very simple test
application, but most likely my missing Xcode skills are to blame for
that. The Cocotron code itself was really simple to cross compile as
everything needed for that was delivered. (This was pretty fast, but
then Cocotron is still a lot less code then GNUstep and my Apple laptop
is also pretty fast compared to my Linux machine)

I am not sure whether that patched gcc and ld would work for GNUstep or
if it would be better to use unchanged versions of these programs to
cross compile GNUstep. What we definitely need is somebody with Xcode
experience to come up with working build settings.


For GNUstep cross compilation we will need not only suitable XCode
project files, but also pre-prepared config.h files for a MS Windows
environment. Doing a configure for cross compilation is bound to fail :-(

I keep you posted on my further progress,
Fred